Time

Content for Monday, April 14, 2025–Friday, April 18, 2025

Readings

• Chapter 8 in The Truthful Art (Cairo 2016)
• The Nuclear Threat—The Shadow Peace, part 1
• 11 Ways to Visualize Changes Over Time – A Guide
• A bunch of (really) short blog posts:
  • What a Hundred Million Calls to 311 Reveal About New York (just look at the picture; you don’t need to read this unless you’re really curious about trends in 311 calls)
  • A century of ocean shipping animated
  • What is seasonal adjustment and why is it used?
  • The start-at-zero rule
  • Keeping one’s appetite after touring the sausage factory
  • Calculating birthday probabilities with R instead of math

Recommended

• The Fallen of World War II
• Visualizing Statistical Mix Effects and Simpson’s Paradox (Armstrong and Wattenberg 2014)
• How To Fix a Toilet (And Other Things We Couldn’t Do Without Search)

Slides

The slides for this week’s lesson are available online as an HTML file. Use the buttons below to open the slides either as an interactive website or as a static PDF (for printing or storing for later). You can also click in the slides below and navigate through them with your left and right arrow keys.

View all slides in new window Download PDF of all slides

Tip

Fun fact: If you type ? (or shift + /) while going through the slides, you can see a list of special slide-specific commands.

Videos

Videos for each section of the lecture are available at this YouTube playlist.

• Introduction
• Axis issues
• Visualizing time
• Starting, ending, and decomposing time

You can also watch the playlist (and skip around to different sections) here:

References

Armstrong, Zan, and Martin Wattenberg. 2014. “Visualizing Statistical Mix Effects and Simpson’s Paradox.” In Proceedings of IEEE InfoVis 2014. https://doi.org/10.1109/TVCG.2014.2346297.

Cairo, Alberto. 2016. The Truthful Art: Data, Charts, and Maps for Communication. Berkeley, California: New Riders.